‘Drink white wine in the morning’

‘Probably best to do the interview before lunch,’ says a spokesman for Gérard Depardieu, France’s best-known export and highest-paid actor. This made sense. The last time I was due to meet Depardieu, at the UK launch of his cookbook two years ago, he failed to make it to the lavish party thrown in his honour, after drinking too much of his own fine wine and falling asleep upstairs.

I’m expecting a partial recluse with Cyrano de Bergerac’s anti-social nature, a Jean de Florette-style curmudgeon with Obelix’s endearing clumsiness. But Depardieu is none of those things. Grumpy and deliberately obtuse, with a disappointing tendency to default to whimsical thespianisms on any subject but wine, he nevertheless betrays glimpses of the infectious bon vivant I hoped he would turn out to be.

Wine, he warns me with a barely perceptible widening of his pupils as we begin to discuss his passion, is not a joking matter.